Ray Ison, Professor in Systems at the UK Open University since 1994, is a member of the Applied Systems Thinking in Practice Group. From 2008-15 he also developed and ran the Systemic Governance Research Program at Monash University, Melbourne. In this blog he reflects on contemporary issues from a systemic perspective.

John Naughton has written an insightful systemic account of the the internet world we inhabit and co-create with the five largest companies on Earth. Here is a taste from his Prospect article:

"The wags who spoke of early smartphones as “Crack-Berry” (a play on
BlackBerry, one early model) were not wrong; they are engines for
dopamine release. In January, two major Apple shareholders urged the
company to address the potential harms
caused by its products. They advised the firm to increase the parental
controls on its devices and research the mental health effects of
excessive use of smartphones. The shareholders, with a combined holding
of $2bn, wrote: “There is a growing body of evidence that, for at least
some of the most frequent users, this may be having unintentional
negative consequences.” A few days later, Roger McNamee, a large and early investor in Facebook,
went public with very similar arguments. Indeed, the whole tendency for
smartphones and social media apps is to “privilege our impulses over
our intentions,” in the words of Oxford computer scientist James
Williams. As a result, in Williams’s view, social media is a threat to
liberal democracy, a system that must always rely on the ordinary
citizen’s capacity for deliberation."